Our Story

We are Simon and Hazel Jeffrey, and between us we are The Woodman and his Wife. We work from Sittingbourne in Kent, in a workshop that has grown, slowly, over more than twenty years. It started the way these things usually do: a few tools, more enthusiasm than sense, and a patch of woodland we could not quite believe was ours to look after.

That woodland is coppiced sweet chestnut, and it still sits at the heart of everything we do. We manage it on a roughly twenty-year rotation, cutting the stools in turn and letting them regrow, the way it has been done in this part of Kent for centuries. When a job needs timber, more often than not it comes from our own ground, felled with our own chainsaws and milled here on site. We run an Alaskan mill, which lets us take a whole trunk and open it up into boards to whatever thickness the work calls for.

Most of what we make begins as a tree we knew before it was ever a plank.

The other thing people are sometimes surprised by is that we do metalwork as well as woodwork, in the same building, on the same day if need be. Simon has his NPTC chainsaw certificates and a GNVQ in Design and Technology, so the making side runs from the standing tree right through to the finished joint or the peened rivet. Hazel came to it from a different direction entirely, with an HND in Fashion Design and Technology. That design background is not a footnote. It is the reason a piece gets drawn properly before it gets cut, why proportions are considered, and why the thing that arrives at your house looks like it was meant to be there rather than simply bolted together.

Having wood and iron under one roof changes what we can say yes to. A lot of workshops will only touch the jobs that fit their machines and their materials. We tend to take on the ones that do not. The oak that came down in your garden in a storm and that you cannot bear to see turned into firewood. A gate for an opening where the posts were put in by someone a hundred years ago and were never square to begin with, so nothing off a shelf will ever hang right. A bracket that has to be forged because the fitting you need was never manufactured. Those are the jobs we like best.

It works because the two halves talk to each other. A heavy chestnut gate wants ironmongery made to carry it, not the nearest hinge that will do. A riven, cleft chestnut fence wants staples and fixings that will outlast the wood. When one person can cleave the timber and the next bench along can make the metal that holds it, you get pieces that belong together from the start.

We work by appointment only, which suits the pace of the thing. It means when you come to us you get our time, and we get to understand what you are actually after before anyone reaches for a saw. Much of what leaves here is one of a kind, made once, for one place, by two people who have been doing this together for a long time.

If any of that sounds like what you have been looking for, we would be glad to hear from you. Call us on 07888 855 219 or email info@thewoodmanandhiswife.co.uk.